Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Online Writing Reflection

Overall, I enjoyed this course. I found it to be challenging yet stimulating. I actually learned things from this course, things I'm likely to retain many years (or at least months) after this final week: the workings of the blog, the Web 2.0 concept, the Semantic Web, and probably most importantly, HTML basics.I feel pretty confident in saying that somewhere down the line of my life, I will encounter HTML again, and having some knowledge of it (or at least knowing where to find codes that I can copy/paste from) will undoubtedly benefit me. I've also enjoyed blogging and plan on making a consistent effort to actually continue this blog for many days to come. We'll see; there's always that chance that it will blow future career opportunities for me, but for now, I'll have fun with it.That said, the one thing that absolutely drove me insane about this class was the projects and the grading. I felt consistently cheated when I turned in a paper that had been shined to perfection, following all of the criteria asked for on the original assignment rubric. But the paper was returned to me, it would always seem like I was being graded down for criteria that never really existed until the instructor decided to add it on during the grading process.Also, I found the peer-review sessions to be completely worthless. For this last project, I told my reviewers to suggest anything at all for my website, and out of the six or so comments, only one actually made a suggestion. All the others said "this looks nice." I would've gained so much more from just sitting down with the instructor for five minutes, hearing what she had to say about the website just from glimpsing over it, and then I could do my best to fulfill those requirements instead of trying to guess EXACTLY what she wants as I am doing with my final project.